1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to representing entities in a manner recognizable by the human senses. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a method and apparatus for modifying an entity sensory representation to establish a relative relationship between the items in an entity represented by the entity sensory representation with respect to one or more factors of interest.
2. Background
In some situations, understanding or analyzing an entity that is made up of multiple items may require understanding or analyzing a relative relationship between the items with respect to some category of interest. For example, understanding how the different regions of the human body are seen from the perspective of the brain may require understanding how richly innervated the different regions are by the brain.
The term “homunculus” is generally used to mean any representation of a small or miniature human being. For example, the homunculus may take the form of a three-dimensional physical model, a two-dimensional image, a three-dimensional computer-aided design model, or some other type of representation. A cortical homunculus is a modified version of a typical homunculus. With a cortical homunculus, the sizes of the different anatomical regions of the human body are in proportion to the amount of brain tissue associated with the anatomical regions in the sensorimotor cortex. This type of visual representation of the human body provides an understanding of how the various anatomical regions are weighted in terms of their relative significance in the human brain.
In some situations, it may be desirable to apply this concept of providing a visual representation of the relative relationship of the different anatomical regions of the human body with respect to the amount of sensorimotor cortical tissue designated for the different anatomical regions to other disciplines. Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method and apparatus that take into account the natural sensory processing and understanding capabilities of humans, as well as other possible aspects, and apply these capabilities to other disciplines.